


he loved riddles so much he became one

by bellesaysmeow



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Background Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, F slur, Gen, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Incest Jokes, Inspired by Paper Towns, M/M, Paper Towns AU, Technically?, Underage Drinking, but i promise this is a valid take, god i forgot how weird this book is, i think they're underage?, i'm erring on the safe side here, in my country they would be but maybe not in the us?, its just some good dumb fun, kinda ooc at times, let me know if I'm wrong, revenge porn, this isnt serious or good
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-13 16:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21497296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellesaysmeow/pseuds/bellesaysmeow
Summary: - Paper Towns AUOswald Cobblepot has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Edward Nygma from afar. So when he cracks open a window and climbs back into his life–dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge–he follows. After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Os arrives at school to discover that Ed, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Os soon learns that there are clues–and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Os sees of the boy he thought he knew.
Relationships: Oswald Cobblepot/Edward Nygma
Kudos: 16





	1. Morning

With a bag in each hand, I paused for a moment outside the van, staring at him. “Well, it was a helluva night,” I said finally.  
“Come here,” he said, and I took a step forward. He hugged me, and the bags made it hard to hug him back, but if I dropped them I might wake someone. I could feel him leaning down and then his mouth was right up against my ear and he said, very clearly, “I. Will. Miss. Hanging. Out. With. You.”  
“You don’t have to,” I answered aloud. I tried to hide my disappointment. “If you don’t like them anymore,” I said, “just hang out with me. My friends are actually, like, nice.”  
His lips were so close to me that I could feel him smile. “I’m afraid it’s not possible,” he whispered. He let go then, but kept looking at me, taking step after step backward. He raised his eyebrows finally, and smiled, and I believed the smile. I watched him climb up a tree and then lift himself onto the roof outside of his second-floor bedroom window. He jimmied his window open and crawled inside.  
I walked through my unlocked front door, tiptoed through the kitchen to my bedroom, peeled off my jeans, threw them into a corner of the closet back near the window screen, downloaded the picture of Tom, and got into bed, my mind booming with the things we would talk about at school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhhh so this idea kinda just came to me when I was thinking about maybe doing a Gotham High School!AU and I was reminiscing on my middle school John Green phase when I realised Ed seems like the kinda guy to pull the shit Margo Roth Spiegelman pulls, so I'm doing this???
> 
> Also I just graduated so I have time and energy to do this shit?


	2. Prologue

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Gotham, I ended up living next door to Edward Nygma.

Our subdivision, Wayne Park, used to be a navy base. But then the navy didn’t need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Gotham, New Jersey, who decided to build a massive subdivision, because that’s what Jersey does with land. My parents and Edward’s parents ended up moving next door to one another just after the first houses were built. Edward and I were two.

Before Wayne Park was a Pleasantville, and before it was a navy base, it belonged to an actual Wayne, this guy Dr. Wayne Wayne. Dr. Wayne Wayne has a school named after him in Gotham and also a large charitable foundation, but the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Wayne Wayne is that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just a rich guy named Wayne Wayne. When he became even more rich and powerful, he went to court, made “Wayne” his middle name, and then changed his first name to “Dr.” Capital D. Lowercase r. Period.

So, Ed and I were nine. Our parents were friends, so we would sometimes play together, biking past the cul-de-sacced streets to Wayne Park itself, the hub of our subdivision’s wheel.

I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Ed was about to show up, on account of how he was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God had ever created. On the morning in question, he wore plaid shorts and an emerald T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange foil. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time.

Ed, as always, biked standing up, his long arms locked as he leaned above the handlebars, his green sneakers a circuitous blur. It was a steam-hot day in March. The sky was clear, but the air tasted acidic, like it might storm later.

At the time, I fancied myself an inventor, and after we locked up our bikes and began the short walk across the park to the playground, I told Ed about an idea I had for an invention called the ‘Ringolator’. The ‘Ringolator’ was a gigantic cannon that would shoot big, coloured rocks into a very low orbit, giving Earth the same sort of rings that Saturn has. (I still think this would be a fine idea, but it turns out that building a cannon that can shoot boulders into a low orbit is fairly complicated.)

I’d been in this park so many times before that it was mapped in my mind, so we were only a few steps inside when I began to sense that the world was out of order, even though I couldn’t immediately figure out _what_ was different.

“Oswald,” Ed said quietly, calmly.

He was pointing. And then I realized what was different.

There was a live oak a few feet ahead of us. Thick and gnarled and ancient-looking. That was not new. The playground on our right. Not new, either. But now, a guy wearing a grey suit, slumped against the trunk of the oak tree. Not moving. This was new. He was encircled by blood; a half-dried fountain of it poured out of his mouth. The mouth open in a way that mouths generally shouldn’t be. Flies at rest on his pale forehead.

“He’s dead,” Ed pointed out, as if I couldn’t tell.

I took two small steps backward. I remember thinking that if I made any sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me. Maybe he was a zombie. I knew zombies weren’t real, but he sure looked like a potential zombie.

As I took those two steps back, Ed took two equally small and quiet steps forward. “His eyes are open,” he said.

“Wegottagohome,” I said.

“I thought you closed your eyes when you died,” he said.

“Edwegottagohomeandtell.”

He took another step. He was close enough now to reach out and touch his foot. “What do you think happened to him?” he asked. “Maybe it was drugs or something.”

I didn’t want to leave Ed alone with the dead guy who might be an attack zombie, but I also didn’t care to stand around and chat about the circumstances of his demise. I gathered my courage and stepped forward to take his hand. “Edwegotta-gorightnow!”

“Okay, yeah,” he said. We ran to our bikes, my stomach churning with something that felt exactly like excitement but wasn’t. We got on our bikes and I let him go in front of me because I was crying and didn’t want him to see. I could see blood on the soles of his green sneakers. _His _blood. The dead guy blood.

And then we were back home in our separate houses. My mother called 911, and I heard the sirens in the distance and asked to see the fire trucks, but my mother said no. Then I took a nap.

My mother is a therapist, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted, all things considered. So, when I woke up, I had a long conversation with my mother about the cycle of life, and how death is part of life, but not a part of life I needed to be particularly concerned about at the age of nine, and I felt better. Honestly, I never worried about it much. Which is saying something, because I can do some worrying.

Here’s the thing: I found a dead guy. Little, adorable nine-year-old me and my not-as-little but definitely more adorable playmate found a guy with blood pouring out of his mouth, and that blood was on his little, adorable sneakers as we biked home. It’s all very dramatic and everything, but so what? I didn’t know the guy. People I don’t know die all the damned time. If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I’d be crazier than a shithouse rat.

That night, I went into my room at nine o’clock to go to bed, because nine o’clock was my bedtime. My mother tucked me in, told me she loved me, and I said, “See you tomorrow,” and she said, “See you tomorrow,” and then she turned out the lights and closed the door almost-all-the-way.

As I turned on my side, I saw Edward Nygma standing outside my window, his face almost pressed against the screen. I got up and opened the window, but the screen stayed between us, pixelating him.

“I did an investigation,” he said quite seriously. Even up close the screen broke his face apart, but I could tell that he was holding a little notebook and a pencil with teeth marks around the eraser. He glanced down at his notes. “Mrs. Bainbridge from over on Wayne Court said his name was Harvey Dent. She told me he lived on Wayne Road in one of those condos on top of the grocery store, so I went over there and there were a bunch of policemen, and one of them asked if I worked at the school paper, and I said our school didn’t have a paper, and he said as long as I wasn’t a journalist he would answer my questions. He said Harvey Dent was thirty-six years old. A lawyer. They wouldn’t let me in the apartment, but a lady named Ethel Peabody lives next door to him, and I got into her apartment by asking if I could borrow a cup of sugar, and then she said that Harvey Dent had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was having trouble at work and was sad about it.”

He stopped then, and I just looked at him, his face grey and moonlit and split into a thousand little pieces by the weave of the window screen. His brown eyes, partially obscured by his horn-rimmed glasses, flitted back and forth from his notebook to me. “Lots of people have trouble at work and don’t kill themselves,” I said.

“I _know_,” he said, excitement in his voice. “_That’s_ what I told Ethel Peabody. And then she said . . .” Ed flipped the notebook page. “She said that Mr. Dent was troubled. And then I asked what that meant, and then she told me that we should just pray for him and that I needed to take the sugar to my mom, and I said forget the sugar and left.”

I said nothing again. I just wanted him to keep talking—that small voice tense with the excitement of almost knowing things, making me feel like something important was happening to me.

“I think I maybe know why,” he finally said.

“Why?”

“Maybe all the strings inside him broke,” he said.

While I tried to think of something to say in answer to that, I reached forward and pressed the lock on the screen between us, dislodging it from the window. I placed the screen on the floor, but he didn’t give me a chance to speak. Before I could sit back down, he just lowered his face down toward me and whispered, “Shut the window.” So I did. I thought he would leave, but he just stood there, watching me. I waved at him and smiled, but his eyes seemed fixed on something behind me, something monstrous that had already drained the blood from his face, and I felt too afraid to turn around to see. But there was nothing behind me, of course—except maybe the dead guy.

I stopped waving. My head was level with his as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don’t remember how it ended—if I went to bed or he did. In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.

Ed always loved riddles. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe he loved riddles so much that he became one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More tags will be added as I go. I just can't ever figure out where the line between too many and not many enough tags is. 
> 
> I love the character of Harvey Dent, but there wasn't enough of him in Gotham for me to write him as a character in this, so I killed him :)
> 
> I'm also in love with the idea of a Super Rich Man Wayne that has more money than common sense. That's who Dr. Wayne Wayne is.


	3. the strings - one

The longest day of my life began tardily. I woke up late, took too long in the shower, and ended up having to enjoy my breakfast in the passenger seat of my mother’s minivan at 7:17 that Wednesday morning.

I usually got a ride to school with my best friend, Butch Gilzean, but Butch had gone to school on time, making him useless to me. “On time” for us was thirty minutes before school actually started, because the half hour before the first bell was the highlight of our social calendars: standing outside the side door that led into the band room and just talking. Most of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room. But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness. I was going to be twenty minutes late, which technically meant that I’d still be ten minutes early for school itself.

As she drove, Mother was asking me about classes and finals and prom.

“I don’t believe in prom,” I reminded her as she rounded a corner. I expertly angled my raisin bran to accommodate the g-forces. I’d done this before.

“Well, there’s no harm in just going with a friend. I’m sure you could ask Sofia Falcone” And I _could_ have asked Sofia Falcone, who was actually perfectly nice and pleasant and cute, despite, you know, being a girl. I wasn’t actually out to my mother, and this didn’t seem like a good time to do it.

“It’s not just that I don’t like prom. I also don’t like people who like prom,” I explained, although this was, in point of fact, untrue. Butch was absolutely gaga over the idea of going.

Mother turned into school, and I held the mostly empty bowl with both hands as we drove over a speed bump. I glanced over at the senior parking lot. Edward Nygma’s green Chevy was parked in its usual spot. Mother pulled the minivan into a cul-de-sac outside the band room and kissed me on the cheek. I could see Butch and my other friends standing in a semicircle.

I walked up to them, and the half circle effortlessly expanded to include me. They were talking about my ex-friend Jim Gordon, who played baseball and was apparently creating quite a stir by dating a cello player named Leslie Thompkins. Jim had decided to go to prom with her. Another casualty.

“Bro,” said Butch, standing across from me. He nodded his head and turned around. I followed him out of the circle and through the door. A large, pale-skinned guy who had hit puberty and hit it very hard, Butch had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend. Plus, he tried hard, and I liked that—most of the time.

“How ya doin’?” I asked. We were safely inside, everyone else’s conversations making ours inaudible.

“Zsasz is going to prom,” he said morosely. Zsasz was our other best friend. We called him by his last name because, as freshmen, we’d decided that ‘Zsasz’ was way cooler than his first name. I’m not sure if he still agrees, but with three and a half weeks left of high school we weren’t very well going to re-nickname him.

“That guy Wendell?” I asked. Zsasz never told us anything about his love life, but this did not dissuade us from frequent speculation.

Butch nodded, and then said, “You know my big plan to ask a freshbunny to prom because they’re the only girls who don’t know the Bloody Butch story?” I nodded.

“Well,” Butch said, “this morning some darling little ninth-grade honeybunny came up to me and asked me if I was Bloody Butch, and I began to explain that it was a kidney infection, and she giggled and ran away. So that’s out.”

In tenth grade, Butch was hospitalized for a kidney infection, but Tom Dougherty started a rumor that the real reason he had blood in his urine was due to chronic masturbation. Despite its medical implausibility, this story had haunted Butch ever since. “That sucks,” I said.

Butch started outlining plans for finding a date, but I was only half listening, because through the thickening mass of humanity crowding the hallway, I could see Edward Nygma. He was next to his locker, standing beside his girlfriend, Kristen. He wore black pants and a blue and green plaid shirt, buttoned to the top. He was laughing at something hysterical—his shoulders bent forward, his big eyes crinkling at their corners, his mouth open wide. But it didn’t seem to be anything Kristen had said, because he was looking away from her, across the hallway to a bank of lockers. I followed his eyes and saw Tom Dougherty with some girl draped all over him like she was an ornament and he a Christmas tree. I smiled at Ed, even though I knew she couldn’t see me.

“Bro, you should just hit that. Forget about Edward. God, that is one candy-coated honeybunny.” I still wasn’t out to Butch, either. I wasn’t sure if he could handle both of his best friends being gay. He thought I was pining over Kristen. As if anyone could see past the beauty of Edward Nygma.

As we walked, I kept taking glances at him through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled _Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past_. As I got closer, I thought maybe he wasn’t laughing after all. Maybe he’d received a surprise or a gift or something. He couldn’t seem to close his mouth.

“Yeah,” I said to Butch, still not listening, still trying to see as much of him as I could without being too obvious. It wasn’t even that he was so pretty. He was just so awesome, and in the literal sense. And then we were too far past him, too many people walking between him and me, and I never even got close enough to hear him speak or understand whatever the hilarious surprise had been. Butch shook his head, because he had seen me see them a thousand times, and he was used to it.

“Honestly, she’s hot, but she’s not _that_ hot. You know who’s seriously hot?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Lee,” he said, who was Ed’s best friend. “Also your mom. Bro, I saw your mom kiss you on the cheek this morning, and forgive me, but I swear to God I was like, _man, I wish I was Oz. And also, I wish my cheeks had penises_.” I elbowed him in the ribs, but I was still thinking about Ed, because he was the only legend who lived next door to me. Edward Nygma, whose four-syllable name was often spoken in its entirety with a kind of quiet reverence. Edward Nygma, whose stories of epic adventures would blow through school like a summer storm: an old guy living in a broken-down house in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, taught Ed how to play the piano. Edward Nygma, who spent three days traveling with the circus—they thought he had potential on the trapeze. Edward Nygma, who drank a cup of herbal tea with the Mallionaires backstage after a concert in St. Louis while they drank whiskey. Edward Nygma, who got into that concert by telling the bouncer she was the bassist’s boyfriend, and didn’t they recognize him, and come on guys seriously, my name is Edward Nygma and if you go back there and ask the bassist to take one look at me, he will tell you that I either am his boyfriend or he wishes I was, and then the bouncer did so, and then the bassist said “yeah that’s my boyfriend let him in the show,” and then later the bassist wanted to hook up with him and he _rejected the bassist from the Mallionaires._

The stories, when they were shared, inevitably ended with, _I mean, can you believe it?_ We often could not, but they always proved true.

And then we were at our lockers. Zsasz was leaning against Butch’s locker, typing into a handheld device.

“So you’re going to prom,” I said to him. He looked up, and then looked back down.

“I’m de-vandalizing the Omnictionary article about a former prime minister of France. Last night someone deleted the entire entry and then replaced it with the sentence ‘Jacques Chirac is a gay,’ which as it happens is incorrect both factually and grammatically.” Zsasz is a big-time editor of this online user-created reference source called Omnictionary. His whole life is devoted to the maintenance and well-being of Omnictionary. This was but one of several reasons why his having a prom date was somewhat surprising.

“So you’re going to prom,” I repeated.

“Sorry,” he said without looking up. It was a well-known fact that I was opposed to prom.

Absolutely nothing about any of it appealed to me—not slow dancing, not fast dancing, not the dresses, and definitely not the rented tuxedo. Renting a tuxedo seemed to me an excellent way to contract some hideous disease from its previous tenant, and I did not aspire to become the world’s only virgin with pubic lice.

“Bro,” Butch said to Zsasz, “the freshhoneys know about the Bloody Butch story.” Zsasz put the handheld away finally and nodded sympathetically. “So anyway,” Butch continued, “my two remaining strategies are either to purchase a prom date on the Internet or fly to Missouri and kidnap some nice corn-fed little honeybunny.” I’d tried telling Butch that “honeybunny” sounded more sexist and lame than retro-cool, but he refused to abandon the practice. He called his own mother a honeybunny. There was no fixing him.

“I’ll ask Wendell if he knows anybody,” Zsasz said. “Although getting you a date to prom will be harder than turning lead into gold.”

“Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds,” I added.

Zsasz tapped a locker twice with his fist to express his approval, and then came back with another.

“Butch, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy, but will instead require force.”

I was trying to think of another one when we all three simultaneously saw the human-shaped container of anabolic steroids known as Bruce Wayne walking toward us with some intent. Bruce Wayne did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from the larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of homicide. “Hey, faggots,” he called.

“Bruce,” I answered, as friendly as I could muster. Bruce hadn’t given us any serious trouble in a couple years—someone in cool kid land laid down the edict that we were to be left alone. So it was a little unusual for him even to talk to us.

Maybe because I spoke and maybe not, he slammed his hands against the lockers on either side of me and then leaned in close enough for me to contemplate his toothpaste brand. “What do you know about Ed and Kristen?”

“Uh,” I said. I thought of everything I knew about them: Kristen was Edward Nygma’s first and only serious boyfriend. They began dating at the tail end of last year. They were both going to Gotham City University next year. Kristen got a secretary job there. She was never over at his house, except to pick him up. He never acted as if he liked her all that much, but then he never acted as if he liked anyone all that much. “Nothing,” I said finally.

“Don’t shit me around,” he growled.

“I barely even _know_ him,” I said, which had become true.

He considered my answer for a minute, and I tried hard to stare at his close-set eyes. He nodded very slightly, pushed off the lockers, and walked away to attend his first-period class: The Care and Feeding of Pectoral Muscles. The second bell rang. One minute to class. Radar and I had calc; Butch had finite mathematics. The classrooms were adjacent; we walked toward them together, the three of us in a row, trusting that the tide of classmates would part enough to let us by, and it did.

I said, “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years would never once type _‘I will go to prom with Butch.’_”

Butch could not resist tearing himself apart. “My prom prospects are so poor that Oz’s grandma turned me down. She said she was waiting for Zsasz to ask her.”

Zsasz nodded his head slowly. “It’s true, Oz.”

It was so pathetically easy to forget about Bruce, to talk about prom even though I didn’t give a shit about prom. Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.

I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks above various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clock. I’d had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Gotham Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

But as much as it felt like third-period physics would never end, it did, and then I was in the cafeteria with Butch. Zsasz had fifth-period lunch with most of our other friends, so Butch and I generally sat together alone, a couple seats between us and a group of drama kids we knew. Today, we were both eating mini pepperoni pizzas.

“Pizza’s good,” I said. He nodded distractedly. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nuffing,” he said through a mouthful of pizza. He swallowed. “I know you think it’s dumb, but I want to go to prom.”

“1. I do think it’s dumb; 2. If you want to go, just go; 3. If I’m not mistaken, you haven’t even asked anyone.”

“I asked Tabitha Galavan during math. I wrote her a note.” I raised my eyebrows questioningly. Ben reached into his shorts and slid a heavily folded piece of paper to me. I flattened it out:

_Butch,_

_I’d love to go to prom with you, but I’m already going_

_with Barbara. Sorry!_

_—T_

I refolded it and slid it back across the table. I could remember playing paper football on these tables. “That sucks,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever.” The walls of sound felt like they were closing in on us, and we were silent for a while, and then Butch looked at me very seriously and said, “I’m going to get so much play in college. I’m going to be in the Guinness Book of World Records under the category ‘Most Honeybunnies Ever Pleased.’”

I laughed. I was thinking about how Zsasz’s parents actually were in the Guinness Book when I noticed a pretty guy with a white, curly mohawk standing above us. It took me a moment to realize that the guy was Wendell, Zsasz’s I-guess-boyfriend.

“Hi,” he said to me.

“Hey,” I said. I’d had classes with Wendell and knew him a little, but we didn’t say hello in the hallway or anything. I motioned for him to sit. He scooted a chair to the head of the table.

“I figure that you guys probably know Victor better than anyone,” he said, using Zsasz’s first

name. He leaned toward us, his elbows on the table.

“It’s a shitty job, but someone’s got to do it,” Butch answered, smiling.

“Do you think he’s, like, embarrassed of me?”

Butch laughed. “What? No,” he said.

“Technically,” I added, “you should be embarrassed of him.”

He rolled his eyes, smiling. A guy accustomed to compliments. “But he’s never, like, invited me to hang out with you, though.”

“Ohhhh,” I said, getting it finally. “That’s because he’s embarrassed of us.”

He laughed. “You seem pretty normal.”

“You’ve never seen Butch snort Sprite up his nose and then spit it out of his mouth,” I said.

“I look like a demented carbonated fountain,” he deadpanned.

“But really, you wouldn’t worry? I mean, we’ve been dating for five weeks, and he’s never even taken me to his house.” Ben and I exchanged a knowing glance, and I scrunched up my face to suppress laughter. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Honestly, Wendell. If he was forcing you to hang out with us and taking you to his house all the time—”

“Then it would definitely mean he didn’t like you,” Butch finished.

“Isn’t he out to his parents? Or are they kinda weird?”

I struggled with how to answer that question honestly. “Uh, no. They’re cool. They’re just kinda overprotective, I guess.”

“Yeah, overprotective,” Butch agreed a little too quickly.

He smiled and then got up, saying he had to go say hi to someone before lunch was over. Ben waited until he was gone to say anything. “That guy is awesome,” Butch said.

“I know,” I answered. “I wonder if we can replace Zsasz with him.”

“He’s probably not that good with computers, though. We need someone who’s good at computers. Plus, I bet he sucks at Resurrection,” which was our favorite video game. “By the way,” Butch added, “nice call saying that Zsasz’s folks are overprotective.”

“Well, it’s not my place to tell him,” I said.

“I wonder how long ‘til he gets to see the Team Zsasz Residence and Museum.” Butch smiled.

The period was almost over, so Butch and I got up and put our trays onto the conveyer belt. The very same one that Bruce Wayne had thrown me onto freshman year, sending me into the terrifying netherworld of Gotham Park’s dishwashing corps. We walked over to Zsasz’s locker and were standing there when he raced up just after the first bell.

“I decided during government that I would actually, literally suck donkey balls if it meant I could skip that class for the rest of the semester,” he said.

“You can learn a lot about government from donkey balls,” I said. “Hey, speaking of reasons you wish you had fourth-period lunch, we just dined with Wendell.”

Butch smirked at Zsasz and said, “Yeah, he wants to know why he’s never been over to your house.”

Zsasz exhaled a long breath as he spun the combination to open his locker. He breathed for so long I thought he might pass out. “Crap,” he said finally.

“Are you embarrassed about something?” I asked, smiling.

“Shut up,” he answered, poking his elbow into my gut.

“You live in a lovely home,” I said.

“Seriously, bro,” added Butch. “He’s a really nice guy. I don’t see why you can’t introduce him to your parents and show him Casa Zsasz.”

Zsasz threw his books into his locker and shut it. The din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, “IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”

I’d heard Zsasz say “the world’s largest collection of black Santas” perhaps a thousand times in my life, and it never became any less funny to me. But he wasn’t kidding. I remembered the first time I visited. I was maybe thirteen. It was spring, many months past Christmas, and yet black Santas lined the windowsills. Paper cutouts of black Santas hung from the stairway banister. Black Santa candles adorned the dining room table. A black Santa oil painting hung above the mantel, which was itself lined with black Santa figurines. They had a black Santa Pez dispenser purchased from Namibia. The light-up plastic black Santa that stood in their postage-stamp front yard from Thanksgiving to New Year’s spent the rest of the year proudly keeping watch in the corner of the guest bathroom, a bathroom with homemade black Santa wallpaper created with paint and a Santa-shaped sponge.

In every room, save Zsasz’s, their home was awash in black Santadom—plaster and plastic and marble and clay and wood and resin and cloth. In total, Zsasz’s parents owned more than twelve hundred black Santas of various sorts. As a plaque beside their front door proclaimed, Zsasz’s house was an officially registered Santa Landmark according to the Society for Christmas. The weirdest part? Neither of Zsasz’s parents were even black. They just really like black Santa.

“You just gotta tell him, man,” I said. “You just gotta say, ‘Wendell, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twentyfour hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.”

Zsasz ran a hand over his bald scalp and shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll put it exactly like that, but I’ll deal with it.”

I headed off to government, Butch to an elective about video game design. I watched clocks through two more classes, and then finally the relief radiated out of my chest when I was finished— the end of each day like a dry run for our graduation less than a month away.

I went home. I ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as an early dinner. I watched poker on TV. My mother came home at six and hugged me. We ate a macaroni casserole as a proper dinner. They asked me about school. She asked me about prom. She marveled at what a wonderful job she’d done raising me. She told me about her day dealing with people who had been raised less brilliantly. She went to watch TV. I went to my room to check my email. I wrote a little bit about _The Great Gatsby_ for English. I read some of _The Federalist Papers_ as early prep for my government final. I IM’ed with Butch, and then Zsasz came online. In our conversation, he used the phrase “the world’s largest collection of black Santas” four times, and I laughed each time. I told him I was happy for him, having a boyfriend. He said it would be a great summer. I agreed. It was May fifth, but it didn’t have to be. My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to, but I did. And so May fifth could have been any day—until just before midnight, when Edward Nygma slid open my screenless bedroom window for the first time since telling me to close it nine years before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't abandoned this crackhead fic; I've just been trying to work it all in together so it makes some semblance of sense. Also updated the tags because that's nice i guess?


	4. the strings - two

I swiveled around when I heard the window open, and Edward’s brown eyes were staring back at me. His eyes were all I could see at first, but as my vision adjusted, I realized he was wearing black face paint and a black hoodie. “Are you having cybersex?” he asked.

  
“I’m IM’ing with Butch Gilzean.”

  
“That doesn’t answer my question, perv.”

  
I laughed awkwardly, then walked over and knelt by the window, my face inches from his. I couldn’t imagine why he was here, in my window, like this. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked. Ed and I were still friendly, I guess, but we weren’t meet-in-the-dead-of-night-wearing-black-face-paint friendly. He had friends for that, I’m sure. I just wasn’t among them.

  
“I need your car,” he explained.

  
“I don’t have a car,” I said, which was something of a sore point for me.

  
“Well, I need your mom’s car.”

  
“You have your own car,” I pointed out.

  
Ed puffed out his cheeks and sighed. “Right, but the thing is that my parents have taken the keys to my car and locked them inside a safe, which they put under their bed, and Myrna Mountweazel”— who was his dog—“is sleeping inside their room. And Myrna Mountweazel has a freaking aneurysm whenever she catches sight of me. I mean, I could totally sneak in there and steal the safe and crack it and get my keys out and drive away, but the thing is that it’s not even worth trying because Myrna Mountweazel is just going to bark like crazy if I so much as crack open the door. So like I said, I need a car. Also, I need you to drive it, because I have to do eleven things tonight, and at least five of them involve a getaway man.”

  
When I let my sight unfocus, he became nothing but eyes, floating in the ether. And then I locked back on him, and I could see the outline of her face, the paint still wet against his skin, smudging on the rims of his glasses. His cheekbones triangulating into his chin, his pitch-black lips barely turned to a smile. “Any felonies?” I asked.

  
“Hmm,” said Ed. “Remind me if breaking and entering is a felony.”

  
“No,” I answered firmly.

  
“No it’s not a felony or no you won’t help?”

  
“No I won’t help. Can’t you enlist some of your underlings to drive you around?” Isabella and/or Kristen were always doing his bidding.

  
“They’re part of the problem, actually,” Ed said.

  
“What’s the problem?” I asked.

  
“There are eleven problems,” he said somewhat impatiently.

  
“No felonies,” I said.

  
“I swear to God that you will not be asked to commit a felony.”

  
And right then, the floodlights came on all around Ed’s house. In one swift motion, he somersaulted through my window, into my room, and then rolled beneath my bed. Within seconds, his dad was standing on the patio outside. “Ed!” he shouted. “I saw you!”

  
From beneath my bed, I heard a muffled, “Oh, Christ.” Ed scooted out from under the bed, stood up, walked to the window, and said, “Come on, Dad. I’m just trying to have a chat with Oswald. You’re always telling me what a fantastic influence he could be on me and everything.”

  
“Just chatting with Oswald?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“Then why are you wearing black face paint?”

  
Ed faltered for only the briefest moment. “Dad, to answer that question would take hours of backstory, and I know that you’re probably very tired, so just go back t—”

  
“In the house,” he thundered. “This minute!”

  
Ed grabbed hold of my shirt, whispered, “Back in a minute,” in my ear, and then climbed out the window.

* * *

  
As soon as he left, I grabbed my car keys from my desk. The keys are mine; the car, tragically, is not. On my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a very small gift, and I knew the moment she handed it to me that it was a car key, and I about peed myself, because she’d said over and over again that they couldn’t afford to give me a car. But when they handed me the tiny wrapped box, I knew she’d been tricking me, that I was getting a car after all. I tore off the wrapping paper and popped open the little box. Indeed, it contained a key.

  
Upon close inspection, it contained a Chrysler key. A key for a Chrysler minivan. The one and the same Chrysler minivan owned by my mother.

  
“My present is a key to your car?” I asked my mother.

  
The long and short of it was this: I had access to the vehicular awesomeness that is a late-model Chrysler minivan, except for when my mother was driving it. And since she drove to work every morning, I could only use the car on weekends. Well, weekends and the middle of the goddamned night.

  
It took Ed more than the promised minute to return to my window, but not much more. But in the time he was gone, I’d started to waffle again. “I’ve got school tomorrow,” I told him.

  
“Yeah, I know,” Ed answered. “There’s school tomorrow and the day after that, and thinking about that too long could make a guy bonkers. So, yeah. It’s a school night. That’s why we’ve got to get going, because we’ve got to be back by morning.”

  
“I don’t know.”

  
“Oz,” she said. “Oz. Darling. How long have we been dear friends?”

  
“We’re not friends. We’re neighbors.”

  
“Oh, Christ, Oz. Am I not nice to you? Do I not order my various and sundry minions to be kind to you at school?”

  
“Uh-huh,” I answered dubiously, although in point of fact I’d always figured it was Ed who had stopped Bruce Wayne and his ilk from screwing with us.

  
He blinked. He’d even painted his eyelids. “Oz,” he said, “we have to go.”

  
And so I went. I slid out the window, and we ran along the side of my house, heads down, until we opened the doors of the minivan. Ed whispered not to close the doors—too much noise—so with the doors open, I put it in neutral, pushed off the cement with my foot, and then let the minivan roll down the driveway. We rolled slowly past a couple houses before I turned on the engine and the headlights. We closed the doors, and then I drove through the serpentine streets of Wayne Park’s endlessness, the houses all still new-looking and plastic, like a toy village housing tens of thousands of real people.

  
Ed started talking. “The thing is they don’t even really care; they just feel like my exploits make them look bad. Just now, do you know what he said? He said, ‘I don’t care if you screw up your life, but don’t embarrass us in front of the Cobblepots—they’re our friends.’ Ridiculous. And you have no idea how hard they’ve made it to get out of that goddamned house. You know how in prison-escape movies they put bundled-up clothes under the blankets to make it look like there’s a person in there?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, well, Mom put a goddamned baby monitor in my room so she could hear my sleep-breathing all night. So I just had to pay Ruthie five bucks to sleep in my room, and then I put bundled-up clothes in her room.” Ruthie is Ed’s little sister. “It’s Mission: Impossible shit now. Used to be I could just sneak out like a regular goddamned American—just climb out the window and jump off the roof. But God, these days, it’s like living in a fascist dictatorship.”

  
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

  
“Well, first we’re going to Publix. Because for reasons I’ll explain later, I need you to go grocery shopping for me. And then to Wal-Mart.”

  
“What, we’re just gonna go on a grand tour of every commercial establishment in Gotham?” I asked.

  
“Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.” I pulled into the Publix then, the parking lot almost entirely empty, and parked.

  
“Listen,” he said, “how much money do you have on you right now?”

  
“Zero dollars and zero cents,” I answered. I turned off the ignition and looked over at him. He wriggled a hand into a pocket of his tight, dark jeans and pulled out several hundred-dollar bills.

  
“Fortunately, the good Lord has provided,” he said.

  
“What the hell?” I asked.

  
“Bar mitzvah money, bitch. I’m not allowed to access the account, but I know my parents’ password because they use ‘myrnamountw3az3l’ for everything. So I made a withdrawal.” I tried to blink away the awe, but he saw the way I was looking at him and smirked at me.

“Basically,” he said, “this is going to be the best night of your life.”


	5. the strings - three

The thing about Edward Nygma is that really all I could ever do was let him talk, and then when he stopped talking encourage him to go on, due to the facts that 1. I was incontestably in love with him, and 2. he was absolutely unprecedented in every way, and 3. he never really asked me any questions, so the only way to avoid silence was to keep him talking.

And so in the parking lot of Publix he said, “So, right. I made you a list. If you have any questions, just call my cell. Listen, that reminds me, I took the liberty of putting some supplies in the back of the van earlier.”

“What, like, before I agreed to all this?”

“Well, yes. Technically yes. Anyway, just call me if you have any questions, but with the Vaseline, you want the one that’s bigger than your fist. There’s like a Baby Vaseline, and then there’s a Mommy Vaseline, and then there’s a big fat Daddy of a Vaseline, and that’s the one you want. If they don’t have that, then get, like, three of the Mommies.” He handed me the list and a hundred-dollar bill and said, “That should cover it.”

_Margo’s list:_

_3 whole Catfish, Wrapped separately_

_Veet (It’s for Shaving your legs Only you don’t Need A razor - It’s with all the Girly cosmetic stuff )_

_Vaseline_

_six-pack, Mountain Dew_

_One dozen Tulips_

_one Bottle Of water_

_Tissues_

_one Can of green Spray paint_

“Interesting capitalization,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.”

Now, I’m not sure what you’re supposed to say to the checkout woman at twelve-thirty in the morning when you put thirteen pounds of catfish, Veet, the fat-daddy-size tub of Vaseline, a six-pack of Mountain Dew, a can of green spray paint, and a dozen tulips on the conveyor belt. But here’s what I said: “This isn’t as weird as it looks.”

The woman cleared her throat but didn’t look up. “Still weird,” she muttered.

“I really don’t want to get in any trouble,” I told Ed back in the minivan as he used the bottled water to wipe the black paint off his face with the tissues. He’d only needed the makeup, apparently, to get out of the house. “In my admission letter from Duke it actually explicitly says that they won’t take me if I get arrested.”

“You’re a very anxious person, Oz.”

“Let’s just please not get in trouble,” I said. “I mean, I want to have fun and everything, but not at the expense of, like, my future.”

He looked up at me, his face mostly revealed now, and he smiled just the littlest bit. “It amazes me that you can find all that shit even remotely interesting.”

“Huh?”

“College: getting in or not getting in. Trouble: getting in or not getting in. School: getting A’s or getting D’s. Career: having or not having. House: big or small, owning or renting. Money: having or not having. It’s all so boring.”

I started to say something, to say that he obviously cared a little, because he had incredible grades and was going to the Gotham City University honors program next year, but he just said, “Wal-Mart.”

We entered Wal-Mart together and picked up that thing from infomercials called The Club, which locks a car’s steering wheel into place. As we walked through the Juniors department, I asked Ed,

“Why do we need The Club?”

Ed managed to speak in his usual manic soliloquy without answering my question. “Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”

It felt like Ed was just rambling to avoid the question at hand. So I repeated it. “Why do we need The Club?”

Ed patted me in the middle of the back softly. “I mean, obviously this is all going to be revealed to you before the night is over.” And then, in boating supplies, Ed located an air horn.

He took it out of the box and held it up in the air, and I said, “No,” and she said, “No what?” And I said, “No, don’t blow the air horn,” except when I got to about the _b_ in _blow_, he squeezed on it and it let out an excruciatingly loud honk that felt in my head like the auditory equivalent of an aneurysm, and then he said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. What was that?” And I said, “Stop b—” and then he did it again.

A Wal-Mart employee just a little older than us walked up to us then and said, “Hey, you can’t use that in here,” and Ed said, with seeming sincerity, “Sorry, I didn’t know that,” and the girl said, “Oh, it’s cool. I don’t mind, actually.” And then the conversation seemed over, except the girl could not stop looking at Margo, and honestly, I don’t blame her, because he is hard to stop looking at, and then finally she said, “What are you guys up to tonight?”

And Ed said, “Not much. You?”

And she said, “I get off at one and then I’m going out to this bar down on Orange, if you want to come. But you’d have to drop off your friend; they’re really strict about ID’s.”

And then Ed proceeded to lie. “He’s actually my _brother_,” he said. Then he sidled up to me, put his hand around my waist so that I could feel each of his fingers taut against my hip bone, and he added, “_And_ my lover.”

The girl just rolled her eyes and walked away, and Ed’s hand lingered for a minute and I took the opportunity to put my arm around him. “You really are my favorite brother,” I told him. He smiled and bumped me softly with his hip, spinning out of my embrace.

“Don’t I know it,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the original line was "he's actually my cousin" but with nygmobs we've really got one choice here for an incest joke


	6. the strings - four

We were driving down a blessedly empty I-4, and I was following Ed’s directions. The clock on the dashboard said it was 1:07.

“It’s pretty, huh?” he said. He was turned away from me, staring out the window, so I could hardly see him. “I love driving fast under streetlights.”

“Light,” I said, “the visible reminder of Invisible Light.”

“That’s beautiful,” he said.

“T. S. Eliot,” I said. “You read it, too. In English last year.” I hadn’t actually ever read the whole poem that line was from, but a couple of the parts I did read got stuck in my head.

“Oh, I know,” he said, a little underwhelmed. I saw his hand on the center console. I could have put my own hand on the center console and then our hands would have been in the same place at the same time. But I didn’t. “Say it again,” he said.

“Light, the visible reminder of Invisible Light.”

“Yeah. Damn, that’s good. That must help with your lady friend.”

“Not really in the lady business,” I corrected him.

“You’re gay?” Ed asked.

“You’re jumping to conclusions?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Although I am,” I admitted, and Ed laughed.

Ed put his feet up on the dashboard and wiggled his toes to the cadence of his speaking. He always talked like that, with this discernible rhythm, like he was reciting poetry. “Right, well, I’m glad you trust me enough to tell me. Not that anyone else does. My lovely girlfriend of lo these many months is fucking someone else.”

I looked over but his hair was all in his face, so I couldn’t make out if he was kidding.

“Seriously?” He didn’t say anything. “But you were just laughing with her this morning. I saw you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I heard about it before first period, and then I found them both talking together and I started screaming bloody murder, and Tom ran into the arms of Valerie Vale, and Kristen was just standing there like a dumbass with the chaw drool running out of her stank mouth.”

I had clearly misinterpreted the scene in the hallway. “That’s weird, because Bruce Wayne asked me this morning what I knew about you and Kristen.”

“Yeah, well, Bruce does as he’s told, I guess. Probably trying to find out for Tom and Kristen who knew.”

“Jesus, why would she hook up with Tom?”

“Well, he’s not known for his personality or generosity of spirit, so it’s probably because he’s hot.”

“He’s not as hot as you,” I said, before I could think better of it.

“That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste. It’s the next exit, by the way. But I’m not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.”

“That’s— ” I started.

“Whatever,” he answered.

It struck me as somewhat unfair that an asshole like Kristen Kringle would get to have sex with both Ed and Tom, when perfectly likable individuals such as myself don’t get to have sex with either of them—or anyone else, for that matter. That said, I like to think that I am the type of person who wouldn’t hook up with Tom Dougherty. He may be hot, but he is also 1. aggressively vapid, and 2. an absolute, unadulterated, raging bastard. Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Tome maintains his lovely physique by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children. “Tom does sort of suck,” I said, trying to draw Margo back into conversation.

“Yeah,” he answered, looking out the passenger window, his glasses reflecting oncoming streetlights. I thought for a second he might be crying, but he rallied quickly, pulling his hoodie up and taking The Club out of the Wal-Mart bag. “Well, this’ll be fun at any rate,” he said as he ripped open The Club’s packaging.

“May I ask where we’re going yet?”

“Kristen’s,” he answered.

“Uh-oh,” I said as I pulled up to a stop sign. I put the minivan in park and started to tell Ed that I was taking him home.

“No felonies. Promise. We need to find Tom’s car. Kristen’s street is the next one up on the right, but he wouldn’t park his car on her street, because her parents are home. Try the one after. That’s the first thing.”

“Okay,” I said, “but then we go home.”

“No, then we move on to Part Two of Eleven.”

“Ed, this is a bad idea.”

“Just drive,” he said, and so I just did. We found Tom’s Lexus two blocks down from Kristen’s street, parked in a cul-de-sac. Before I’d even come to a complete stop, Ed jumped out of the minivan with The Club in hand. He pulled open the Lexus’s driver-side door, sat down in the seat, and proceeded to attach The Club to Tom’s steering wheel. Then he softly closed the door to the Lexus.

“Dumb bastard never locks that car,” he mumbled as he climbed back into the minivan. He pocketed the key to The Club. He reached over and tousled my hair. “Part One—done. Now, to Kristen’s house.”

As I drove, Ed explained Parts Two and Three to me.

“That’s quite brilliant,” I said, even though inside I was bursting with a shimmering nervousness.

I turned onto Kristen’s street and parked two houses down from her McMansion. Ed crawled into the wayback of the minivan and returned with a pair of binoculars and a digital camera. He looked through the binoculars first, and then handed them to me. I could see a light on in the house’s basement, but no movement. I was mostly surprised that the house even had a basement—you can’t dig very deep before hitting water in most of Gotham.

I reached into my pocket, grabbed my cell phone, and dialed the number that Ed recited to me. The phone rang once, twice, and then a groggy male voice answered, “Hello?”

“Mr. Kringle?” I asked. Ed wanted me to call because no one would ever recognize my voice.

“Who is this? God, what time is it?”

“Sir, I think you should know that your daughter is currently having sex with Tom Dougherty in your basement.” And then I hung up. Part Two: accompli.

Ed and I threw open the doors of the minivan and charged down the street, diving onto our stomachs just behind the hedge ringing Kristen’s yard. Ed handed me the camera, and I watched as an upstairs bedroom light came on, and then a stairway light, and then the kitchen light. And finally, the stairway down to the basement.

“Here he comes,” Margo whispered, and I didn’t know what he meant until, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a shirtless Tom Dougherty wiggling out of the basement window. He took off sprinting across the lawn, naked but for his boxer shorts, and as he approached I jumped up and took a picture of him, completing Part Three. The flash surprised both of us, I think, and he blinked at me through the darkness for a white-hot moment before running off into the night.

Ed tugged on my jeans leg; I looked down at him, and he was smiling goofily. I reached my hand down, helped him up, and then we raced back to the car. I was putting the key in the ignition when he said, “Let me see the picture.”

I handed him the camera, and we watched it come up on the screen together, our heads almost touching. Upon seeing the stunned, pale face of Tom Dougherty, I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh, God,” Ed said, and pointed. In the rush of the moment, it seemed that Tom had been unable to get Little Tom inside his boxers, and so there it was, hanging out, digitally captured for posterity.

“It’s a penis,” Ed said, “in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn’t big.”

I looked back at the house and noticed that the basement light was now off. I found myself feeling slightly bad for Tom—it wasn’t his fault he had a micropenis or that Ed was so brilliantly vindictive.

But then again, in sixth grade, Tom promised not to punch my arm if I ate a live earthworm, so I ate a live earthworm and then he punched me in the face. So I didn’t feel very bad for very long.

When I looked over at Ed, he was staring at the house through his binoculars. “We have to go,” Ed said. “Into the basement.”

“What? Why?”

“Part Four. Get his clothes in case he tries to sneak back into her house. Part Five. Leave fish for Kristen.”

“No.”

“Yes. Now,” he said. “She’s upstairs getting yelled at by her parents. But, like, how long does that lecture last? I mean, what do you say? ‘You shouldn’t cheat on your boyfriend in the basement.’ It’s a one-sentence lecture, basically. So we have to hustle.”

He got out of the car with the spray paint in one hand and one of the catfish in the other. I whispered, “This is a bad idea,” but I followed behind him, crouched down as he was, until we were standing in front of the still-open basement window.

“I’ll go first,” he said. He went in feetfirst and was standing on Kristen’s computer desk, half in the house and half out of it, when I asked him, “Can’t I just be lookout?”

“Get your short ass in here,” he answered, and so I did. Quickly, I grabbed all the boy-type clothes I saw on Kristen’s lavender-carpeted floor. A pair of jeans with a leather belt, a pair of flipflops, a Gotham Park High School Giants baseball cap, and a baby blue polo shirt. I turned back to Ed, who handed me the paper-wrapped catfish and one of Kristen’s sparkly purple pens. He told me what to write:

A message from Edward Nygma: Your relationship with him—it sleeps with the fishes

Ed hid the fish between folded skirts in Kristen’s closet. I could hear footsteps upstairs, and tapped Ed on the shoulder and looked at him, my eyes bulging. He just smiled and leisurely pulled out the spray paint. I scrambled out the window, and then turned back to watch as Ed leaned over the desk and calmly shook the spray paint. In an elegant motion—the kind you associate with calligraphy or Zorro—she spray-painted a question mark onto the wall above the desk.

He reached his hands up to me, and I pulled him through the window. He was just starting to stand when we heard a high-pitched voice shout, “DWIGHT!” I grabbed the clothes and took off running, Ed behind me.

I heard, but did not see, the front door of Kristen’s house swing open, but I didn’t stop or turn around, not when a booming voice shouted “HALT!” and not even when I heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being pumped.

I heard Ed mumble “gun” behind me—he didn’t sound upset about it exactly; he was just making an observation—and then rather than walk around Kristen’s hedge, I dove over it headfirst. I’m not sure how I intended to land—maybe an artful somersault or something—but at any rate, I spilled onto the asphalt of the road, landing on my left shoulder. Fortunately, Tom’s bundle of clothes hit the ground first, softening the blow.

I swore, and before I could even start to stand, I felt Ed’s hands pulling me up, and then we were in the car and I was driving in reverse with the lights off, which is how I nearly came to run over the mostly naked starting shortstop of the Gotham Park High School Giants baseball team. Tom was running very fast, but he didn’t seem to be running anyplace in particular. I felt another stab of regret as we backed up past him, so I rolled the window halfway down and threw his polo in his general direction. Fortunately, I don’t think he saw either Ed or me, and he had no reason to recognize the minivan since—and I don’t want to sound bitter or anything by dwelling on this—_I can’t drive it to school._

“Why the hell would you do that?” Ed asked as I turned on the lights and, driving forward now, began to navigate the suburban labyrinth back toward the interstate.

“I felt bad for him.”

“For him? Why? Because he’s been sleeping with my cheating girlfriend for six weeks? Because he’s probably given her, and now me, god-only-knows-what disease? Because he’s a disgusting idiot who will probably be rich and happy his whole life, thus proving the absolute unfairness of the cosmos?”

“He just looked sort of desperate,” I said.

“Whatever. We’re going to Lucius’s house. It’s on Pennsylvania, by the ABC Liquors.”

“Don’t be pissed at me,” I said. “I just had a guy point a freaking shotgun at me for helping you, so don’t be pissed at me.”

“I’M NOT PISSED AT YOU!” Ed shouted, and then punched the dashboard.

“Well, you’re screaming.”

“I thought maybe—whatever. I thought maybe she wasn’t cheating.”

“Oh.”

“Lucius told me at school. And I guess a lot of people have known for a long time. And no one told me until Lucius. I thought maybe he was just trying to stir up drama or something.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah. I can’t believe I even care.”

“My heart is really pounding,” I said.

“That’s how you know you’re having fun,” Ed said.

But it didn’t feel like fun; it felt like a heart attack. I pulled over into a 7-Eleven parking lot and held my finger to my jugular vein while watching the : in the digital clock blink every second. When I turned to Ed, he was rolling his eyes at me. “My pulse is dangerously high,” I explained.

“I don’t even remember the last time I got excited about something like that. The adrenaline in the throat and the lungs expanding.”

“In through the nose out through the mouth,” I answered him.

“All your little anxieties. It’s just so . . .”

“Cute?”

“Is that what they’re calling childish these days?” He smiled.

Ed crawled into the backseat and came back with a small bag. _How much shit did he put back there_? I thought. He opened up the bag and pulled out a full bottle of nail polish so darkly green it was almost black. “While you calm down, I’m going to paint my nails,” he said, smiling up at me through his glasses. “You just take your time.”

And so we sat there, he with his nail polish balanced on the dash, and me with a shaky finger on the pulse of myself. I didn’t know he liked to paint his nails. It was a good color of nail polish, and Ed had nice fingers, even thinner and longer than the rest of him, which was already thin and long. He had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own. I remembered them against my hip bone in Wal-Mart, which felt like days ago. My heartbeat slowed. And I tried to tell myself: Ed’s right. There’s nothing out here to be afraid of, not in this little city on this quiet night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> four chapters in one night? impossible


End file.
